Guest Blog: Can Christian politics in Australia be redeemed?

Modern voters seem to find few figures more revolting than the Christian politician: the party man who plays the dirty game, kisses the babies (or their mothers' hair), puts the knife into his comrades when necessary and then, meekly kneeling, confesses his sins before almighty God. The public account offered by these politicians, Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd among them, was even less edifying this election than usual.

Mike Seccombe, writing in The Global Mail, said Abbott's schools policy launch at the "fundamentalist" Penrith Christian School was a "holy smoke signal" that he was ready to "stick it up both the secular/humanist left and the [Liberal Party's values-lite] reptilian right." The ABC's Annabel Crabb saw the campaign differently: "when politics and religion find themselves at odds in the breast of a politician, politics wins ... Caesar will usually be ahead [of God] in the queue."

Are our politicians motivated by faith or do they merely use it as a smokescreen? Nobody can say. The sclerotic criticisms of Christian politicians by secular journalists are as useful when it comes to answering such a question as professions of moral goodness from the politicians themselves.

Nonetheless, every cry of "hypocrisy!" does seem to point to the promise of a more radical faith that takes its own tenets seriously - a more convincing kind of orthodoxy. The living Word of the Gospels is undiminished even when proclaimed from the rotten mouths of party machine men. When Rudd and Abbott's detractors turn the Golden Rule back against them, there seems to be lurking behind every accusation a different kind of demand: "Can anyone really believe without hate? If you truly do, then believe for me too!" Perhaps this explains why Rudd's now infamous "Faith in Politics" essay was taken to be the authentic proof of his good character (and not his altogether forgettable essay on "extreme capitalism").

Regardless, Christian politicians - almost universally conservatives - are losing ground on every one of their "core issues":

Accurate statistics on abortion rates are hard to come by due to discrepancies in data collection and other factors, but government estimates put the figure between 70,000 and 80,000 a year, with little sign of slowing (pro-life groups put the stats higher). Zoe's Law, "foetal personhood" legislation being pushed through NSW Parliament, has attracted criticism from the NSW Bar Council and women's groups, despite assurances from Chris Spence, the Liberal MP introducing the bill, that exceptions in the legislation will not disrupt the settlement on abortions.

On gay marriage, Rodney Croome, the convenor of the Australian Marriage Equality lobby group, wrote in New Matilda this week that "the future of marriage equality was never about the choice between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott ... the 2013 election is a step forward for marriage equality, because there are now more supporters in both parties than ever before." (If only heterosexual marriage was in such an optimistic place! During the election Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews sunk to offering $200 vouchers to engaged couples for marriage counselling.)

Another plum issue, a mandatory anti-pornography internet filter, was proposed by Liberal MP Paul Fletcher and done in the neck by Malcolm Turnbull within hours of it being announced last week.

It's not surprising, then, that the putative political standard bearers of conservative Christian orthodoxy have been making concessions when it comes to public morals. "[Abortion] hasn't been a political issue in our country for years and years and years," Abbott said during the campaign, to take one example. "The last thing we should want to do in this great country of ours is to politicise issues like this and go down the American path." He has also deferred the question of a conscience vote on gay marriage to the party room - an unprecedented move that would likely have scandalised his mentor, John Howard, who decided on such matters himself. Needless to say, Rudd's "Damascus Road" moment on gay marriage was insufficient to swing the public.

Yes, a Christian politics should profess a witness on the "issues." But, as Jesus Christ said, as reported in the Gospel of Luke, "If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them ... Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Let the spiritually and ideologically dead bury their own, and find new ways and places to proclaim the kingdom - this is an injunction to develop a new, more radical Christian politics. Rather than micromanaging uteruses and anuses, Christians should draw upon orthodoxy to develop a real response to the historical situation in which the polity finds itself, a situation where people are no longer presented with the choice of selling their dignity and self-respect for profit, but are forced to.

Such a project couldn't be more necessary. A strange new Malthusian political compact is being built between a scientistic view of technological progress, a new miserable eugenics in the guise of sustainability, and the consolidation of the most parasitic, abstract facets of global capital. This compact is quickly displacing the human being from the centre of politics. American Catholic writer Michael Stafford recently described it as an economy of fear and a politics of exclusion. We're once again sending prisoners down the salt mines in the NT and the personalities of talkback radio deny we have a responsibility to rescue the drowning - Stafford's description seems apt enough.

What of his solution? "Simply put: social democracy humanizes savage capitalism," Stafford writes. "Progressive economic, tax and regulatory policies give the beast a human heart, perhaps even a soul. They are essential elements of an ethical economy, which must, as a matter of course, involve limitations on greed." Greens leader Christine Milne, as well as the majority of the ALP, would not disagree. Capitalism, while inherently antagonistic, can nonetheless be yoked to a welfare state that stops it from becoming a meat grinder.

How will Australia continue to fund such a system? Our tax base is already shallow and will be reduced further under Abbott. But how could we raise taxes on individuals, or increase the GST? As recorded by economist Steve Keen, Australia's private debt - mainly mortgages, but also credit cards and so on - has grown to crisis levels under both Labor and the Coalition. Keen has been predicting rapid debt deflation for some time, and says middle-class welfare, like the first homebuyers' grant, has only contributed to the housing bubble.

A public overleveraged with debt is the potentially game-changing economic issue. Christopher Joye (not exactly a left wing radical) wrote this week that "there is a real chance Australia could, belatedly, have an acute housing crash with real consequences for the economy." He went on to write:

"This highly leveraged consumer is an artefact of Australia's even more leveraged banking system ... A stunning 33 per cent of new home loans are today being advanced with LVRs [loan-to-value ratio, the higher the riskier] greater than 80 per cent. In some countries they don't even allow banks to lend at these levels, period."

At the other end of the scale, youth unemployment is at 27 per cent, and is as high as 40 per cent in some areas. Why would Gen Y get married and have children? We can't even afford to rent, let alone buy. In such a precarious situation, the prevalence of abortion and euthanasia, poverty, depression and so on increasingly becomes a kind of "default," to use the dismal language of economics - a market failure in humanity.

Ideally a new Christian political compact would begin with addressing the issue of precarity. The term was, after all, a theological one, developed by Leonce Crenier, a Benedictine monk from France who was a convert from anarchism. He was appointed Prior of the Abbey of St-Benoit-du-Lac in 1931, at a time when it was facing bankruptcy. His response was to impose iron discipline on the Monks to repay the money, while trusting God to provide for them:

"The Lord punishes me for my iniquities, while sending me what I need at the critical moment, but no more. I find that good. Poverty obliges me to hang with God, so to speak. I certainly would not ask for as much I do, if we were comfortable."

"I noticed that real poverty, where one misses so many things, attracts singular graces amongst the monks, and in particular spiritual peace and joy," he wrote 30 years later.

Rather than imposing European style austerity and public sector cuts - something Tony Abbott is likely to do, despite the economy's fundamentals being strong - perhaps the political and media class could impose it upon themselves as a first measure. The excesses of the election circus, the money spent on cheap political stunts, the endless leaks and backgrounding in the press, the widespread rorting of expenses, the revolting spectacle of Eddie Obeid and Ian MacFarlane before ICAC - if political organisations demanded real discipline and loyalty from their MPs and hacks, they might begin to reclaim a moral warrant to engage in far-reaching reform.

At the very least, this might involve a momentary examination of conscience: "What does it say about us that we keep preselecting imbeciles like Jaymes Diaz and Craig Thomson?" Who knows - perhaps if our politicians had to do more with less, they would do less busy work? They could then address the big issues that were missing from the election: housing supply, the strengthening of consumer and corporate watchdogs like ASIC and the ACCC and assisting consumers to pay down their debt sensibly.

Whether through government intervention or market incentives (or a combination of both), an intervention into the housing market to increase supply is a boilerplate issue every church could get behind, and potentially help to organise as a significant civil society actor, in concert with local government. Likewise, the churches could easily champion the cause of well-financed and powerful regulators without appearing partisan - after all, dishonest and predatory corporate practices hurt almost everyone (the exceptions are obvious), regardless of who they vote for.

Such a response is already expected from Christianity. "The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples," Pope Francis said earlier this year. "She urges financial leaders to take account of ethics and solidarity. And why should they not turn to God to draw inspiration from his designs?" Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe said something similar, though in his own vernacular:

"Christianity is deeply subversive of capitalism precisely because it announces the improbable possibility that men might live together without war; neither by domination nor by antagonism but by unity in love."